Cover Questions – The Venus Trap by Louise Voss

Today I welcome Louise Voss to the blog to answer some questions about her new cover of The Venus Trap.

Louise Voss has been writing for the past seventeen years, with many twist and turns in her career. She started her publishing life with four novels for Transworld/Black Swan, the first of which, To Be Someone, was published in 2001 with its own CD soundtrack.

To Be Someone was followed by three more contemporary women’s fiction novels, Are You My Mother?, Lifesaver, and Games People Play, until she successfully switched to publishing thrillers with Mark Edwards in 2011. She and Mark were the first British indie authors to reach No.1 on the Amazon charts with Catch Your Death, where they stayed for the month of June 2011, with their novel Killing Cupid also at No. 2. This led to a four-book deal with Harper Collins.

Today Louise is a hybrid author, ie. self-publishing her solo novels and continuing to publish with Mark. Thomas & Mercer have just published From The Cradle, their fifth novel together, and her first solo thriller, The Venus Trap, will be out in February 2015.

I love the cover Louise. The darkness of the door and implications of what can hide behind a door, with the contrasting brightness of the pink title really draws your eye. Were you able to have any input in the design and if not, are you happy with the results?

Thanks! I’m really happy with it. My editor, Emilie Marneur, and I discussed what sort of concept we should go for at length before she had the idea of the door handle. And we both loved other covers with similar bold colours on it – the turquoise and pink – so wanted to incorporate those. The designers tinkered around with the colour scheme and layout for a few weeks to get it right – my only initial query was that my name was really small at first – DISASTER, obv! 😉 – and that in an earlier incarnation the lettering was too dark and I thought it looked as though it was called The Enus Rap (although I’m sure it didn’t really!). But I liked the design as soon as I saw it.

It has drawn me in with the dark and the femininity. They clash somehow. I’m intrigued. What can you say about the book?

I’m extremely glad you said that, because without having ever properly articulated it, I now realise that this clash sums up the book very accurately. It’s more ‘romantic suspense’ than an out-and-out thriller, I’d say, with my poor protagonist having plenty of time in her incarceration to mull over past relationships and issues. She knew – and disliked – her captor back when they were both teenagers, so she thinks a lot about those years, helped by the discovery of the diary she kept in 1986 when she was sixteen. Another genre definition for it would be ‘chick noir’.

The Venus Trap? It exudes feminine danger. It’s dark and makes your mind go places. I’m rubbish at titles. At what point did the title come to you?

Ahem, I am also rubbish at titles, as Mark (Edwards, my co-author on five other novels) will tell you – in fact he came up with the title for me. It’s had various working titles, An Army of Lovers being the most enduring one, but that was before I completely rewrote it as a thriller, so I think The Venus Trap works perfectly. And I would never have come up with that (I think the only one of our joint titles that I thought of was Forward Slash…possibly…!)

When is the publication date?

February 23rd.

And without giving anything away, if you could be one of the characters, who would you be and why?

Well it wouldn’t be the hapless protagonist, Jo, that’s for sure – she has a horrendous time! The book is very much focused on her and Claudio, the man who holds her captive, which is intentional to create a sense of claustrophobia – but you do hear about her two girlfriends, both of whom I liked very much. So I’ll say I’d like to be Jo’s childhood friend Donna. She’s the sort of woman you would go to for advice, down to earth but a good laugh.